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Settling Into Fall

I’m in bit of shock that it’s not just the second half of October, it’s the last third of October.

We’ve ended up with pretty minimalist external demands—Orff music for Flora once a week, Tang Soo Do for Cinder twice a week, and they both have just started drama for 8 weeks at Evergreen. And it’s been my deadline lax time of year—about to turn into deadline hell, but I have another week of grace, I think—and still, I don’t think I’ve ever felt time pass so quickly.

Perhaps it’s the gorgeous weather? We’ve been able to be outside so much of September and October.

Our Learning Plan, in which I for the first time ever dared to make some more solid predictions, was out the window
the day I sent it off to the School Board. We briefly left Ancient Greece for Venice with The Thief Lord, but are now back into the realm of the Greek gods—as they morph into Roman ones—courtesy of Rick Riordan’s The Lost Hero. Bunnicula‘s made a brief reappearance, primarily in early reader form—if there are other fans of the vampire bunny out there, there’s a new series of mini-chapter books James Howe has been writing called Tales from the House ofBunnicula. They’re both fun read alouds and manageable read alones for a Flora (not a Cinder), so we’ve been enjoying those. And back to the Horrible Science mags. Another new thing: Life of Fred the elementary series—this very oddball approach to math through story. Flora loves it; she devoured the first volume, Apples, in a handful of days, and now we’re more slowly reading through Butterflies. (Cinder’s a passive participant; the math is way easy for him, but I think he enjoys some of the silliness.)

I’ve mostly been focusing on creating good morning and meal routines—with various levels of success. We’ve been getting out to walk the dog en mass first thing in the morning (our definition of first thing in the morning: at the crack of anywhere between 9:30 and 11 a.m.), and I’ve been doing the Taco Tuesday/Pizza Friday meal schedule thing pretty consistently. I think I need to do the same thing to lunch. 🙂 Them kids, they just won’t stop eating!